But the real question is, how does it come that now already 800,000 often centuries-old olive-trees in Salento, Puglia, are infected by Xylella fastidiosa?.

Did the Italian and European authorities sleep for 10 months or was the bacterium inoculated artificially over a wide range at the same time? Though the vector is spread by insects, the epidemic has reportedly already cost producers US$335m (€250m, £200m) – a figure expected to rise.

The growers shall now be forced to destroy many trees in the worst-afflicted areas when an emergency decree comes finally into force next week. The EU bureaucrats and their delaying “study-teams” certainly did sleep.

‘There will be a genuine “cordon sanitaire” of 8,000 hectares where it will be obligatory to destroy the trees’, stated Angelo Corsetti, a spokesman for Coldiretti, the national agricultural organisation.

Venatrix Fulmen is an investigative journalist taking on the Ugly Horde (Banksters, Corporations, Corrupt Governance and their Politicians and Military). She can be reached directly via venatrix.fulmen[AT]tightmail.com

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